In 2004, SiteGround was established, and its main office is in Sofia, Bulgaria. Since then, it has developed into a reputable business with data centers on three continents, where it hosts more than 2.8 million domains.
Since 2017, we have kept an eye on SiteGround and evaluated the web hosting provider in terms of performance, customer service, price, and other factors. We'll use that information to analyze SiteGround's features in-depth and determine whether picking this host is a wise decision for you.
Let's get started.
Advantages of Using SiteGround
What criteria do you use to evaluate web hosting companies? Performance, perhaps? Customer support? load times for pages? Friendliness to beginners?
Reviewing SiteGround's hosting features will help us determine what makes it unique.
1. Almost 100% Uptime
Excellent uptime of 99.99% was achieved by SiteGround during the last 12 months. Over the course of the year, the web host encountered 15 outages with a total of only 15 minutes of downtime. That's rather remarkable.
The worst month for SiteGround was March 2022, with an average uptime of 99.98% and a total downtime of just eight minutes.
A 99.9% uptime guarantee is provided by SiteGround in its service level agreement. A month of hosting will be provided at no cost to you if the host ever drops below that level.
That's a big claim, yet this web server definitely keeps its uptime promises. on reality, SiteGround maintained a 100% uptime for a continuous six months, as seen on the graph above.
2. A variety of plan choices with affordable starting costs and a money-back guarantee
The starter prices for SiteGround are reasonable, with shared hosting options starting at roughly $3.99/month (with occasionally even greater savings available).
When on sale, the starting monthly prices for the two additional professional plans (GrowBig and GoGeek) are around $6.69 and $10.69, respectively.
The following attributes are included in each SiteGround plan:
Gratuitous SSL certificates
internal caching
Network for free delivery of content
daily automated backups
email addresses
limitless bandwidth
supervised WordPress
Additionally, the GrowBig plan includes sophisticated features like:
30% quicker on-demand backup copies PHP Staging
The GoGeek plan, however, provides significantly more:
Backup copies on demand are 30% quicker White-label customers using PHP Staging and Git
Cost-free private DNS
greatest level of resources
top-tier assistance
For individuals that use WordPress and WooCommerce to manage their company websites, SiteGround offers additional hosting alternatives like WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting.
For websites that need a more powerful hosting option than shared hosting, the provider also provides cloud hosting, which is accessible starting at $100/month.
With cloud hosting, you don't share a server's resources with other websites; instead, you get the entire server to yourself. Additionally, cloud hosting provides:
8 GB Memory, 4 CPU Cores, 40 GB SSD Space, and 5 TB Data Transfer
The shared hosting plans from SiteGround also come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, while the cloud hosting plans have a 14-day money-back promise.
Remember that the refund policy only applies to new customers; if your plan has previously been renewed, you will not be eligible for a refund.
3. Reasonable Server Reaction Time
Google advises keeping your server's response time to under 200 milliseconds. However, the typical value ranges from 100 to 500 milliseconds. So while SiteGround's response time isn't ideal, it is still acceptable.
In the previous year, SiteGround's response times averaged 384 milliseconds, although they progressively increased over the year, making a significant improvement.
As an illustration, it reported a reaction time of 343 ms in December 2022, which was more than 64% quicker than its response time of 373 ms in November 2022 in January 2022.
Despite this, several web hosting providers excel above SiteGround in this area. For instance, throughout the same time period, Hostinger averaged 318 ms and A2 Hosting averaged 295 ms.
Because of this, even if SiteGround provides some extra capabilities for enhancing website speed, such as Ultrafast PHP, SuperCacher, and SG Optimizer, the slower response time compared to other web hosts may become a concern if you work in a highly competitive sector.
4. A user-friendly interface
It's not too difficult to register with SiteGround. When you log in, the SiteGround Control Panel (cPanel), which has the following appearance:
Beginners will love Site Tools, a section of SiteGround's cPanel that is simple to use and comes with a description for each function.
Additionally, you may personalize the main screen by pinning the tools you use the most to it. Overall, Site Tools is straightforward, practical, and simple enough for anybody to use.
5. A variety of security tools and a free Cloudflare CDN
To safeguard its servers and the websites it hosts, SiteGround employs a number of security safeguards. Let's Encrypt free SSL certificates are the company's first security feature, available with any package.
Information exchanged back and forth between your website and the user's device is secure thanks to SSL. If left unguarded, hackers might readily intercept this information.
Along with the free SSL certificates, SiteGround also provides:
a system using artificial intelligence (AI) that prevents billions of brute-force attacks every hour.
a specialized WordPress security plugin to protect your website from typical malware and brute-force assaults.
a solution for real-time monitoring that probes the server status every 0.5 sec.
a personalized web application firewall (WAF) to shield websites and the hosting environment against newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Additionally, all shared plans from SiteGround come with a free Cloudflare CDN. Large files are kept by a CDN on several servers scattered throughout the globe. As a result, when someone accesses your website, they are linked to the closest CDN, which expeditiously sends them your material.
6. Free Daily Backups
Regardless of the plan, SiteGround performs daily automatic backups for all websites. On shared hosting plans, each backup is kept for 30 days; on SiteGround's cloud hosting plan, it is kept for 7 days.
Consequently, in the worst-case situation, you would only lose the adjustments you had made in the previous day.
Go to Site Tools > Security > Backups to access the Backup Restore solution.
Additionally, the GrowBig and GoGeek plans include five complimentary on-demand backups. But if you're on the StartUp plan, the only way to make a single on-demand backup is to pay more.
To boost security and redundancy, the web host additionally distributes and stores the backups across many data centers. Therefore, a backup copy is still available even if one copy is destroyed.
7. Free WordPress site migration
You don't have to worry about the dreaded procedure of transferring your website to a new host if you already have a website. The WordPress Migrator plugin from SiteGround makes it simple.
You may move an infinite number of websites for free from practically any server to SiteGround with the plugin. The plugin will do the labor-intensive work for you; all you have to do is produce a token from within your SiteGround hosting account.
You only need to access Site Tools > WordPress > Migrator.
For $30 per website, SiteGround will help you migrate a website for you, saving you the time and effort of doing it yourself.
8. Outstanding Customer Support Staff
The support staff at SiteGround is outstanding. The most challenging problems are often solved by the team in about 15 minutes.
A ticketing system, phone support, and a live chat channel are all available for interaction through the host's round-the-clock service.
We chose to test them using the live chat feature, and within a minute, we were connected to a customer service representative. In less than four minutes, we then received the response to our query.
Customers may also use a knowledge base on SiteGround to get quick solutions. Every page has a help widget that directs you there, where you can access tutorials and articles with a wealth of knowledge.
Additionally, the web hosting company offers a podcast where it posts numerous audio files that teach various technological subjects. The podcast is rarely updated, though; at the time this SiteGround review was published, a file from April 2021 had just been added.
Would We Suggest SiteGround?
We do, indeed.
Our SiteGround review demonstrates that this hosting company has provided exceptional uptime and a user-friendly UI. Additionally, SiteGround offers top-notch customer support and a selection of plans that are appropriate for both huge online stores and small and medium-sized organizations.
On all subscriptions, the server also provides free Cloudflare CDN and SSL certifications. So, that's a benefit.
However, over time, the pricing options offered by SiteGround are not especially compelling. Your renewal rates are significantly higher after 12 months of a favorable introductory rate. When you select the 24-month plan ($9.99 instead of $3.99), the charges nearly quadruple, even on the initial plan. Thus, you only have a year of service left before you encounter such hefty renewal prices.
Even so, you may test out SiteGround's web hosting for a time with the introductory deals and decide if it's a good long-term choice for you.